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What is gravity?


What is gravity?
Our Planet


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by Mya Kagan (whyzz writer) >> more about the author

You’ve probably heard of gravity. It’s a pretty special part of living on Earth and even if you aren’t sure of what it is, you’re experiencing it every day without even knowing it!

Most of us know gravity the way we experience it: As the special force that is constantly pulling you and everything around you toward the center of the Earth! 

Without gravity, a ball you throw up into the air wouldn’t fall back down towards the ground! Even a fork you tried to place on the dinner table would float in the air without gravity, as well as all of the food on your dinner plate! 

Because you can’t necessarily feel the way it pulls you down, it can be hard to understand the way that gravity is always there, but you would know if it ever suddenly wasn’t there because you’d start floating in the air! 




- Have you ever seen a picture or video of astronauts walking on the moon? If so, you probably noticed that any time they stepped or jumped, they went much higher into the air than we do here on Earth when we make the same movements! That’s because not all places in the universe have the same amount of gravity as we have here on Earth. The moon, for example, has about one-sixth as much gravity as Earth. However, gravity can only get weaker and weaker… it can never “disappear completely” or become “zero”!

- One really special thing about gravity is that it can’t be “shielded” or “stopped.” Even a plane or bird that can stay up in the air by flying is not “stopping” gravity. Instead, these things that can fly are keeping themselves up in the air by special means (like by how air is directed around their wings). If, for example, a bird were to stop flapping its wings, gravity would immediately pull it back towards the ground!






Great Gravity!

Think about some things you do every day and how they would be different with less gravity. 

For example, playing sports would be very different (you might even need different rules!) and putting away your toys might be more difficult, because they’d just float right out of the places where they belong! It also might be difficult to fall asleep unless you used seatbelts to keep yourself down on the bed! 

What are some of the other benefits you can think of to the gravity we have here on Earth??